The supremely editable medium.

It goes without saying that one of the big pluses of working digitally is the ability to make changes cleanly and quickly. Below is a great example of this in action; I created this illustration and showed it to my agent, and she suggested that I try and change things up and work with a new palette. And so, with just a couple simple hue/saturation layers, I was able to rework the colors and change the overall mood of the piece. The best part is that it only took about 10 minutes.

Children's Book Publishing with Matt Faulkner, Julie Downing and Andrea Brown

Just finished this insightful video about children's book publishing. Worth watching for anyone new (or not so new), and is thinking about coming into this field. They talk a little about submissions guidelines, book dummies, and other important things one should know. They also touch on the current state of children's book, and the hot topic of digital ebooks. Worth checking out.

All aboard!

Welcome to my very first blog! After much procrastination, I have finally decided to start a blog! It is my hope that this will be a creative outlet for me to share my ideas and illustrations. I have tossed around the idea of blogging for quite some time but have never actually made the plunge, but now that I have...I hope this will be the swift kick in the arse that I need to take my work to the next level. My goal is to post here at least once a week(in theory anyway), with something hopefully worth showing or talking about. So without further ado...

I thought this would be a great way to start things off. Above is the mockup for my promotional catalog submission my agency will be putting out this year. The emphasis of this catalog was to showcase characters, and I think it accomplished this fairly well. There's a good variety of characters in the mix, although I would have liked to have squeezed in a kid or two, given that 90% of what I illustrate are kids. One would think that given this 90%, I would have been able to pull out just one kid from all the work I've done that I thought would work, but alas, for whatever reason, I found not a single one! Hopefully the potential clients who see this will put two and two together and realize that I can probably illustrate them as well...yeah hopefully.